Sprinting and Age

Yesterday, I realized we’re all sprinting to old age. Today, I realized that those of us who are lucky enough to make it to a certain age should refrain from sprinting. The aging process is a relative state of mind, of course, as we’ve all witnessed young sixty-year-olds and old forty-year-olds, but no matter how old we are, we occasionally receive reminders that we’ve aged. As opposed to the scenes in movies, the aging process rarely hits us in an “Oh my gawd, I’m (fill in the age here)!” one day in front of a mirror. Aging is more of a gradual process that hits us in tiny, little, and seemingly insignificant ways, every day. We fell on a Tuesday doing something we’ve done our whole lives. It was embarrassing, and all that, but everyone falls every once in a while. It wasn’t always this painful, but everyone falls. We tripped trying to skip a stair on a Wednesday, and we’ve skipped a stair since our legs grew long enough to do so. (Mental note, skipping stairs is no longer in our repertoire.) On Thursday, we caught ourselves making old man sounds when we sat, but we can’t even remember when we started doing that. We admired a beautiful person on Friday, and someone informed us that we’re probably too old to continue doing that. “It’s just odd,” they said, “considering the age gap.” On another day, sometime in the future, someone considered our admiration inappropriate, and then it morphed into “Absolutely disgusting” that we should admire the beauty of a 20-year-old, “because you’re old enough to be her grandpa!” We all know we’re aging on a physical, superficial level, but mentally we’re not so far removed from that energetic, wildly enthusiastic 20-year-old who was afraid to talk to girls, until someone suggests that we should know better now. We do know better on one level, but their scorn is a painful reminder of how much we’ve aged. We do the calculations in our head, and we realize they’re right, we are, in fact, that old now. The realizations that we’re that old now are not about any of one of those little things. It’s about all of them. It’s about that big old snowball that’s been accumulating over the years without notice.

“You know you’re old when you fall and no one laughs,” a comedian once said. You know you’re old when they’re surrounding you after the fall, and they’re not there to point and laugh at you. They’re there, because they’re concerned. You know you’re old when no one laughs about it later, even behind your back. People aren’t laughing anymore. They’re concerned. It’s humiliating. The science of their silence involves a calculation of our age and the impact of our fall. It’s no longer funny. It’s so disturbing that some consider it alarming. What happened? He was sprinting. “Ok, well, he probably shouldn’t be sprinting at his age,” they instruct one another.

“He probably shouldn’t be running,” they said. They used the word he, as if they were doctors instructing our loved ones that they should take over this matter because it’s obvious that we can’t control our facilities anymore. They addressed us in the first person when we were young, and they instructed us how to act with some scorn, implying that we were too young to know any better. Everything in between involved laughter, for they knew we were old enough to know better but young enough to sustain the damage of our stupidity. We might feel some warmth when we realize how much they care about us, but that fades when we realize their resolutions mirror those family members make when their loved ones are no longer capable of caring for themselves. They have no problem telling us when we’re too old to oggle, but no one tells us when we’ve reach a point where it’s considered ill advised to sprint.

This impromptu game of ‘keep away’ developed organically. My nephew was in the middle, laughing as hard as the two adults were on the sides. Another kid ran into help him, then three, then four, then so much more. It wasn’t young versus old, but it evolved into it. It started out friendly, but it evolved into a competitive definition of whatever remained of our athletic ability. I started out tossing the ball from a stationary position. I was laughing and failing on purpose, giving the kids a chance, until one of them said something that I considered a playful yet provocative question regarding my athletic ability. I went from light-hearted attempts to get open to employing quick, ankle spraining jukes. When I realized I couldn’t shake my nephew, those quick movements evolved into some running. I ran every single day at one point in my life, so it was not a concern to me. I don’t know if I started losing, or if I sensed that the others were further questioning my ability, but I began sprinting to open spots to capitalize on the holes in their coverage. It dawned on me, while doing it that I haven’t done this in years. No one gave this a second thought for most of my life. Some people run, some people sprint.

I didn’t see the spectators watching, but I could feel it. I even saw a couple stand with some concern. Did they see this as part of the game we were playing, or were they wondering if they should begin sprinting too? Did they stand to source the emergency that sparked my progression? I looked over to verify that they were watching me, but in that casual glance, I almost tumbled. I couldn’t look back at them. I had to be mindful of my feet. (Mental Note, running now requires more focus.) Running was not my greatest concern. Stopping was. I had a myriad of little feet under mine, and I had to focus to avoid them.

I know I’m not as athletically inclined as I once was, but who is? I am smarter now. I know how to use my facilities much better than I did when I was younger. In the midst of these throws, my competitive juices got the best of me. I overdid it. I knew my best presentation could be had sitting on the lawn furniture with the other old people, talking about what old people talk about with a glass of lemonade in hand on a sunny day, but I didn’t decide to play this game. An impromptu game broke out and evolved into a character-defining match of my ability against theirs. I could not just quit. “Why did you quit?” I imagined one of them asking me. “Because I’m old and I can’t handle the physical requirements of such a game anymore.” Yeah, that’s not in my nature.

The nephew I once held as an infant was shutting me down in coverage as I wrote, and I encouraged it verbally, but I also wanted to discourage it physically. I wanted to prove to be so dominant that he left our little game demoralized. To do so, I employed some of the know how I picked up along the way, using the bag of tricks I developed in the years I spent playing intramural football. Michael Jordan developed a fade away when his skills started to decline. I developed a few moves of my own over the years. “Youth is wasted on the young,” Winston Churchill said. What if I had this wide array of jukes when I was younger, I asked myself, would I have been better? I sprinted to the right, juked, and went further right. In doing so, my fellow old man led me well with a pass. My ability to stop on a dime and juke surprised my nephew. He went left to cover the traditional juke that would’ve involved me going left, and he did so right under me. To avoid taking him out, I had to adjust. (Mental note, my ability to adjust on the fly has receded.) I tripped over his feet. (Mental Note, studies show that the chances of tripping increase exponentially when we sprint.) Been there, done that. (Mental note, watch out for the ground, it hurts. Parked cars can hurt too when approached at top speed. Try to avoid them as much as possible, because they can be unforgiving.) The final humiliation arrived later that night in the form of a phone call phone from my nephew, apologizing for getting me so worked that I almost ended up impaled on a car.